The first full day of this year’s Denver Gold Forum opened with an announcement of a co-operative agreement between the Denver Gold Group (DGG) and the World Gold Council (WGC), followed by some extremely interesting presentations and a fascinating and informative panel discussion on paper gold, but which still left some key questions unanswered, or unclear.

Regarding the co-operation – in a joint announcement the DGG and WGC noted that between them the two groups represent almost all the world’s top gold miners in terms of production, mineral reserves and market value. Through closer co-ordination and collaboration they aim to ensure that miners are better informed on demand drivers, market trends and key developments. While both parties may have differing outlooks on the industry, arguably their purposes do coincide.

The DGG’s Executive Director, Tim Wood commenting on the agreement noted: ““For some time the interests of our members have been aligned, so it makes strategic sense to work more closely. After nearly three decades of service to the industry, the Denver Gold Group has evolved as a significant platform for sharing ideas, information and experience.

The World Gold Council produces the highest quality market data and insights, informed by its direct experience of the consumer markets. We believe this knowledge and perspective is important for our members, particularly to counter-balance the short-term, sentiment-driven commentary that often crowds the gold space.”

But back to the conference, the day opened early with two parallel keynote addresses and the writer attended the one on exploration trends and their likely impact on the industry looking ahead from David Cox of SNL Financial – which has recently been acquired by McGraw Hill.

While the overall mood of the conference may indeed be more positive than the past three years’ precious metals price performance might suggest – well the mining companies wouldn’t be in it if they didn’t think there was great excellent upside potential ahead – Cox and SNL’s analysis showed what has been in effect a pretty disastrous experience within the gold exploration space, with the majors initiating some big cutbacks, while the juniors, which had hitherto provided the largest part of exploration activity, struggling with lack of funding available to maintain a decent level of exploration activity.